Posts tagged ‘Obama Administration’

In the maneuvering to affix blame for the mess that is sequestration, the Republicans in Congress would have us believe this was all the President’s idea to begin with,

while the Obama Administration would have us believe that it was a deal that was never supposed to take effect. Not really. And yet, both sides voted for it. Both sides agreed to play this dangerous game.

And that’s the problem. The debate has never been a question of whether or not we should even be pursuing a politics of austerity in the first place, it has merely been a question of the precise balance of pain that was to be exacted upon those less fortunate than those who will determine our fate.

Most major issues remain unresolved at the U.N. climate summit in Doha as negotiators enter the final stretch of the two-week summit. While the Doha talks involve nations working toward a pact to limit greenhouse gases starting in 2020, many say the world cannot wait that long. The United States has come under intense criticism at the summit from environmentalists and smaller nations who say President Obama has failed to meet his stated commitments to tackle global warming. We’re joined by Kumi Naidoo, executive director of Greenpeace International; and Samantha Smith, head of the World Wildlife Fund’s Global Climate and Energy Initiative.

As the Chicago public school teachers’ strike enters its second day, we’re joined by the journalist and author Chris Hedges. “The teacher strike in Chicago is arguably one of the most important labor actions in probably decades,” Hedges says. “If it does not prevail, you can be certain that the template for the attack on the union will be carried out across the country against other teachers unions and against the last redoubt of union activity, which is in the public sector of course, fireman and police.” Hedges continues, “It is always the ruling class that determines the parameters of rebellion and resistance. And the Chicago strike illustrates the bankruptcy of both traditional labor and the Democratic Party. And that is why the Occupy movement was so important.” Hedges is the author of the new book with illustrator Joe Sacco, “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt.”

With extreme weather fueling wildfires in Colorado and record rainfall in Florida, the Obama administration has moved closer to approving construction of the southern section of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline. We’re joined by environmentalist, educator and author Bill McKibben, founder of the grassroots climate campaign 350.org. “Today is one of those days when you understand what the early parts of the global warming era are going to look like,” McKibben says. “For the first time in history, we managed to get the fourth tropical storm of the year before July … These are the most destructive fires in Colorado history and they come after the warmest weather ever recorded there … This is what it looks like as the planet begins to warm. Nothing that happened [at the United Nations Rio+20 summit] will even begin to slow down that trajectory.”

Margaret Flowers of Physicians for a National Health Program sees one major flaw in President Obama’s Affordable Care Act: It did not go far enough. The only solution, Flowers argues in this conversation with Laura Flanders, is to push for universal healthcare by expanding medicare so that it covers all Americans.

Public spending is under assault from the United States to Europe in the name of fighting deficits. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argues in his new book, “End This Depression Now!”, that the hysteria over the deficit will constrain an economic recovery in a time of high unemployment and stagnating wages. “The economics is really easy,” says Krugman, “If we were to spend more money at the government level, rehire the school teachers, firefighters, police officers who have been laid off in the last several years because of cutbacks, we would be a long way back toward full employment. … Right now there’s just not enough spending. We need the government to step in and provide the demand we need … We’ve had austerity in the face of a recession in a way that we’ve never had before since the 1930s. The results are clear — it is disastrous.” Krugman writes about the economy as a columnist for the New York Times and is a Professor of Economics at Princeton University.

The Obama administration is now tying states’ access to federal education funds to the ways they hold teachers accountable for students’ success. That all sounds good in theory, but The Nation’s Dana Goldstein explains how this is causing most states to push test-heavy approaches to evaluating student achievement, and how such models can hurt student’s engagement more than they can help.

A shortened version of this speech was given at a public forum sponsored by AWARE, the local Anti War Anti Racism Effort in Urbana, Illinois on the evening of April 30, 2009 at the Urbana City Council Chambers.

John R. MacArthur, Ken Silverstein, Juan Santos, Matt Gonzales, Alexander Cockburn, Ralph Nader, Anthony Arnove, Lance Selfa, Joshua Frank, and Noam Chomsky, I have been living proof that the FOX News crowd is wrong when it says that all of “the left” is deeply and hopelessly in love with His Holiness the Dali Obama. It is true, I think, that much of what passes for a left in the U.S. has been unduly captive to the Obama phenomenon but many of us on the actual, so-called “hard left” have never fallen for the myth of Obama as some sort of progressive Mr. Smith-Goes-to-Washington character who is willing and ready to take on the corporate and military power elite. We’ve tended to see him rather as what MacArthur, the president of Harper’s Magazine, calls “a moderate with far too much respect for the global financial class.”

Before I get into specifics I want to make six quick caveats or qualifications that might provide some useful context for my remarks. The first caveat as is that for all my harsh judgments, I have never doubted that what Barack Obama has been doing is highly intelligent from the perspective of seeking glory and advancement within the narrow institutional and ideological framework of the dominant U.S. political system and culture. Obama and his team are masterful political actors and most of what I disapprove of in their behavior is heavily incentivized by that system and culture.

Second, my critique of the Obama administration is informed by a deeper and broader critique of the Democratic Party and its longstanding role of defining and policing the constricted leftmost parameters of acceptable political debate in the U.S. For the last century it has been the Democratic Party’s distinctive assignment to play what the Marxist author Lance Selfa calls “the role of shock absorber, trying to head off and co-opt restive [and potentially radical] segments of the electorate” by posing as “the party of the people.” If you buy my book Barack Obama and the Future of American Politics, you’ll see that I find Obama’s political career richly consistent with Selfa’s analysis and with the presidencies of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, and Bill Clinton.